Occasional rantings about Dynamics CRM/365, Power BI, SharePoint, Office 365 and Azure cloud. Intrigued about how people collaborate and data driven decision making. Taking the first small steps in machine learning. Putting all of the above in practical use to help companies "embrace" their customers

Wednesday, March 19, 2014

Why enterprise social networks matter

In an time where globalization, co-creation and cross-company cooperation is essential for a company’s survival it is quite strange to see why companies still hesitate to embrace enterprise social networks (See Trends impacting collaborative tools and platforms for more background information)

The fact that we are more and more working in different locations makes it more difficult to use our traditional means of communication and collaboration. Especially in organization where physical face-to-face meetings are less and less the norm you see a change in how people collaborate.

In the late 1970s Tom Allen (MIT) undertook a project to determine how the distance between engineers’ offices was related to the way that they communicated and collaborated. One of the key findings was the fact that the probability of communicating at least once a week drops significantly if people are more than 50 feet apart.

We also see that people are not only working on multiple locations (separation by space) but also more and more asynchronously. This might be caused by the fact that people work in different time zones but also by the rise of flex-working.

This separation in both distance and time provides for some specific challenges which are hard to resolve using traditional technologies. Typical intranet and email solutions are broadcasting and are push technologies. Especially with email you see that the sender chooses the recipients (push medium instead of pull) and replies overload mailboxes.

Another side effect of using email as a many-to-many async mechanism is that knowledge gets trapped in email clients with no easy means of discovery and searching for knowledge. When a new employee enters the company he will probably be subscribed to a large number of email distribution lists but he has no access to all of the conversations which were ongoing or which happened in the past.It is however essential that to create an organization in which social is embedded, that you need something more than enabling software tools. It is critical to have a social computing strategy that aligns business objectives, required cultural change, supporting processes and technology.